Erith by Quentin S. Crisp

Author:Quentin S. Crisp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zagava
Published: 2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

One thing that had struck me since coming to Bexleyheath was the state of amnesia that I took (having recently returned from Japan) to be representative of Britain as a whole (or England, if I am presuming too far with Britain). Pound shops—Poundland, Poundstretcher, etc—proliferate, since we must go on spending even if we have little left to spend. Such is the senility of capitalism. The high streets, when not riddled with vacant premises, are stamped into place with cheap templates of commerce hurriedly pushed into use by the ever larger, ever fewer business monopolists. I see no heath in Bexleyheath. I see no ‘furze’, though the Wetherspoon pub is named, almost wistfully, ‘The Furze Wren’. The true sources of life have been buried. Without memory, even as we walk and talk, and line up by the checkout tills, we sleep.

At the checkout in Sainsbury’s, I awoke momentarily.

“Have you got a Nectar Card?”

How strange, it occurred to me, the choice of name for their loyalty card. However the Romans might have defiled nature with their mythology, it was as nothing compared to what we have done. There is not a flower or even a star that we have not trivialised. Chesterton makes much of the fact that Christianity succeeded paganism chronologically. We cannot go back to paganism, because we have already grown out of it. By this philosophy of chronological progression, surely we must admit that Christianity is as corrupted now as late paganism was. It has become materialism, since Chesterton’s “unearthly” Christianity has ultimately severed the bonds of spirit and matter, leaving us only matter—and Sainsbury’s. Is there not to be some further progression now, just as Chesterton argues Christianity was the necessary progression for the pagan world to make?

What day was it when I lay on the bed that still felt so unfamiliar to me, looking up at the cracks and stains on the ceiling, to which my floaters were added as moving cracks and stains, and thought about St. Francis of Assisi, diagnosed with incipient blindness, preparing to have his eyeballs cauterised with a red-hot brand, and greeting the fire as his brother?

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